Fed Jobs Are Dropping. An important and positive employment trend has gone overlooked.

NRO ^ | 6/6/06 | By Greg Kaza

[.cnI redruM]

>>>That represents a loss of more than one in every five federal employees since 1990

Does this count troop reductions from 1991 to 2000?

[rhombus]

Do these figures account for all the additional TSA employees at airports?

[deport]

Maybe for your list?

[dirtboy]

Does this count troop reductions from 1991 to 2000?

That was my thought.

[dirtboy]

Not only that, but look at all the government functions that have been outsourced to private companies. IMO you still have to look at federal spending as a percentage of GDP.

[Non-Sequitur]

Not only that, but look at all the government functions that have been outsourced to private companies.

I just finished a contract with the Federal government, and if you think the job reductions have been impressive so far just watch the next 10 years. I would wager that fully 75 percent of the government employees I came in contact with were 50 or older. You are going to see waves of retirements in the next 10 years, and the government will have to rely on outsourcing firms to take up the slack.

[dirtboy]

And how are such companies paid? Tax dollars. I do agree there are greater efficiencies to outsourcing, but that does not change the fact that the government is still spending money to do those functions. So if you couple military reductions and outsourcing, it may seem that the government is shrinking, but it is not.

[ncountylee]

In the average year, only about 400 Federal employees are fired for cause. Read this figure sometime ago and was stunned.

[Non-Sequitur]

And how are such companies paid? Tax dollars. I do agree there are greater efficiencies to outsourcing, but that does not change the fact that the government is still spending money to do those functions. So if you couple military reductions and outsourcing, it may seem that the government is shrinking, but it is not.

Oh no doubt about it. The government is playing the same shell game that business does. They outsource functions, either laying off the staff or converting them to employees of the outsourcing company, and then can say, "See how large our headcount reductions were?" The government is already big into this, and it will only grow as their in-house workforce retires and isn't replaced.

[cryptomc]

That is a misleading statistic. My brother is head of Human Resources for a major department of the government. This all started under Clinton with Gore's "re-inventing " government. True , the number of "Federal" employees are down, but government expenditures are up. What started under Clinton was that people would take early retirement, walk out the door, and the next week be hired in as a private contractor for exactly the same job. So in reality, they are double dipping. It sounds good that the number of employees are down, but the payrolls are actually up.

[2banana]

Remember when Clinton cut the military and told the country (with a straight face) that he is cutting the size of government...!

[RexBeach]

Same here. A drop of 51M in fed workers since President Bush got elected may be nothing more than fed workers leaving the workforce for the private sector or retirement. 51M fewer federal jobs since 2001? No big deal here.

[MarkeyD]

Not suprising. I worked for the DOD as a first job out of school and the most important thing for the lifers was reaching tenure so they could coast.

[.cnI redruM]

Yes, they do.

[Fruitbat]

Anyone have the data for which jobs were lost amidst growth in some other areas of government?

[.cnI redruM]

Having worked for the Feds the last five years, I'd argue that's an overestimation. You have to be genuinely stupid to be fired for cause.

[untrained skeptic]

Military and intelligence gathering is where the largest cuts in federal employees came from under the last part of Bush Sr. and Clinton's administrations. Another significant reason the number of federal employees decreased was the move to increasing the number of contractors used in place of civil servants. There are often benefits to doing that, but it makes the decreases in federal employees a bit of a misleading indicator.

I do not consider Bush to be fiscally conservative. He's not the least fiscally conservative President we've had. I think he's better than Clinton was, and better than Gore or Kerry would have been.

He was the least bad of the choices we had in this particular aspect. I hope we do better in 08.

[.cnI redruM]

The US has not had a fiscally conservative President since Lyndon Johnson. We won't until the 2018 bankruptcy of Medicare.

[RobFromGa]

Not only that, but look at all the government functions that have been outsourced to private companies.

It is far better to have these jobs outsourced to private companies then it is to have these jobs performed by goevernment employees. But you are right that spending is WAY TOO HIGH!

[.cnI redruM]

They do that so they can actually fire someone who does a bad job.